Broadcasting as Controversial TV on Sky Channel 200, Edge Media is a platform for alternative viewpoints, the kind the government and orthodox media don't want you to know about. But how much truth can a man take? I've been ordered by the Guardian to sit in the full beam of its transmissions for 24 consecutive hours, and report my findings. I don't have Sky, so I went to my friend Matt's house.

12:00 A squashed-looking man called Theo Chalmers is talking quite vaguely about aliens. At noon. But that's okay. I expect you get your news from the Guardian, because you can only handle truth that's been wrung through a mung bean. Theo and I can handle the harder stuff.

13:00 A woman interviews a man on an Essex park bench about how he used to psychokinetically electrify his dinner money, like Matilda. Dog-walkers pass them, uninterested. I look out of the window at what I suspect could be the last sunny day of the year.

15:00 The crap graphics of the Edge Media ident are revealing. Satellites hover over pyramids, revealing their third eye, matching a tablet in an Mayan temple, where some UFOs watch, er, a T-Rex roaring at a pharaoh. The shroud of Turin floats through space to the dark side of the moon where, reflected in an astronaut's visor is … well, I can't actually make it out. It's truth-shaped, though.

17:00 Democracy Now! would be an energising call to arms against injustice. Unfortunately this is Democracy Now, no exclamation mark, a tedious look at what's happening in democracy now: for which read US politics (Michelle Obama: that's what's happening). Where are the nutcases?

18:00 There are only three adverts on this station, and the repetition is doing my nut. The Esoteric Agenda convention in Manchester (an Ideal Homes expo for radical malcontents) is trailed with trance music and the catchy tagline "Art Sex Attention Prisms" alongside an epilepsy-inducing pick'n'mix of Vitruvian Men, eyeballs and triangles. Uncensored Magazine's spot runs along similarly hysterical lines, screaming MARTIAL LAW UPDATE, and WHAT YOUR DOCTOR WILL NEVER TELL YOU, and WAS FUKUSHIMA A FALSE FLAG OPERATION? There are holistic adverts for special salt, and the rest of the unfilled advertising time is given over to galleries of crop circles. Crop circles are so boring.

19:30 More Yank malaise, this time following the Occupy movement. There's also a section reassuring us that Julian Assange is safe in the Ecuadorian embassy. My friend Matt weighs in: "Yeah, but it's not a very nice embassy. Have you been in the Moroccan ambassador's house down the road? It's like walking into the 70s."

20:00 Now things are getting interesting: it's The Light And Energy Show. Filmed cheaply in a breezeblock basement, a lady who could be Vanessa Feltz interviews a man called Nick Ashron. Ashron is a luscious mullet in a brocaded greatcoat who sketches people's spirit guides. It's not an interview so much as a monologue of self-regard punctuated with simpers. "I heard about this Jesus and thought, 'I want to do something like that.'" Nick's drawings all look like Legolas. "I didn't know whether to pursue my music or my healing. Eventually I released a CD of healing music." Matt leaves the room and doesn't come back.

21:00 Red Zone. Four actors, including Christopher Ellison from The Bill and Yvette the waitress from 'Allo 'Allo! are sitting on red sofas in a darkened room, discussing topics selected entirely at random. Jack Marsden, who's been in Heartbeat, announces: "We have two legs and a mouth to perambulate the cock and balls around. We don't think for ourselves." DCI Burnside is even better value: "I wasn't a hippy, although I got a lot of free love in the 60s." "I had to do a Welsh accent in a soft porn movie in the 70s" "I'm closer to death than any of you." The topics all veer quickly toward sex. 'Was there sex addiction in the time of Taoism, Jack? 'I don't know, I wasn't there.' This is almost certainly the best programme I've ever seen. "Kids are evil!" says Yvette.

23:00 I've got a headache, but things are hotting up now. Nick Ashron is back with his own show: Lightworker's Guide To The Galaxy in association with Starship Pegasus. He's still dressed as a pirate, but has added clanking amulets and a rigatoni choker to the mix. He's avidly reviewing a book called How To Become A Money Magnet.

00:00 On the stroke of midnight, a man who looks like Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours stands in front of a pinboard and talks at me about the New World Order and the cabals who manipulate our governments and media (FYI – The Illuminati, Majestic 12 and Committee of 300; you're welcome). "My wife Wanda and a lady from Wales assembled this factboard about the dark forces with info from the higher orders," Ronnie attributes, "whom I suspect were the Galactic Federation of Light." I'm starting to feel quite sad.

01:00 There's a break for Teleshopping, but I want the truth, not trinkets. I log on to Edge Media's Video On Demand service to hear a prominent activist equating Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people with Nazi Germany.

02:00 Squashed Theo is back, talking about the falsification of British history, with a Welshman who looks like a recently exhumed Peter Stringfellow. There are claims that the lost tribes of Israel are Welsh, that Camelot is in Wales, and that the Ark of the Covenant is buried in Wales. Fantastic stuff. There's a CGI rendering of the Ark, which looks like something Kanye West might keep a woman in. I realise everyone on this station has long hair. The men have very long hair. The women look like saloukis. I'm blinking slower than Lauren Bacall and suspect I have bedsores.

04:00 I'm nodding in and out of consciousness like Ozzy Osbourne now; I have no recollection of this time, and my notes look like an ebbing cardiogram.

06:00 I snap back to "reality" with On The Edge, wherein the eccentrically named Alex:g delves the sinister goings-on behind small court cases. For a show that swims in muddy water, he has the looks and naïve credulity of Murray from Flight Of The Conchords. "You shouldn't have to pay for your own lie-detector test. That's terrible." Chaining doughnuts, my blood sugar level is up and down like a service elevator freighted with type 2 diabetes.

07:00 The low-quality titles to Now That's Weird depict cartoon electricity crackling between the menhirs of Stonehenge. The guest's chortling condescension and eager cynicism suggest he's unimpressed with the raft of crackpot bullcrap suggested by "ordinary" members of the public, but not because they're obviously wrong. His air of "Yes, I already predicted that and have Google image searched the evidence already" superiority make him sound like a bellend. He's a paranoid without portfolio.

08:00 Nick Ashron is back again, interviewing yet another business consultant. The backs of my eyeballs itch and my scalp crawls.

09:55 Bridging Heaven & Earth: a lantern-jawed US hippy presents a sort of Take Hart for acid casualties. A viewer sends in a picture of a rainbow octopus reaching for some lightning, which briefly makes me cry. Then there's Tuvan throat singing and an instrumental from Wolfrobe, which makes me go and sit on the toilet for 25 minutes.

12:00 My body, drained of sensation, registers no triumph as I reach the 24-hour mark. I have bad breath and tinnitus. On-screen, Theo is talking about the afterlife. Apparently the body floods with glutamate during near-death experiences. "You could have a mystical experience after a Chinese meal."

THE END In a heap, I reflect on what I've learned from my foray into the frontiers of truth. This station's bifurcation into paranoid conspiracy theory and New Age quackery is not as jarring as it first appears: both are wholesale rejections of mainstream society, retreats into deep cynicism on one hand, and naive optimism on the other. Concerns about the abuses of government, corporations, the surveillance society and energy crisis are not marginal any more, although – as with any amateur choir – it's the strangest voices that stand out. I've been judging their hairstyles, rudimentary CGI and fixed-camera shots, suggestive of lonely bunker-babble. Maybe I'm just tired but perhaps some truth is buried down there with them. After all, "a paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on", according to William Burroughs. What's more, I've worked in a newsroom, and can personally attest that they are run by lizard kings. They actually keep the editors on human leashes. It's sick.